Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of portals and portlets and more particularly to the management of white spaces around portlets.
Description of the Related Art
Distributing content about large computer communications networks is not without its challenges. In particular, the quantity of content available for distribution in a computer communications network often varies proportionally to the size of the computer communications network. At the extreme, the Internet hosts a vast quantity of content not easily accessible by most end-users. Portals represent a sensible solution to the problem of aggregating content through a channel paradigm in a single, network-addressable location. In consequence, portals have become the rage in content distribution.
Portlets are the visible active components included as part of portal pages. Similar to the graphical windows paradigm of windowing operating systems, each portlet in a portal occupies a portion of the portal page through which the portlet can display associated content from a portlet channel. Portlets are known to include both simple applications such as an electronic mail client, and also more complex applications such as forecasting output from a customer relationship management system. The prototypical portlet can be implemented as server-side scripts executed through a portal server.
From the end-user perspective, a portlet is a content channel or application to which the end-user can subscribe. By comparison, from the perspective of the content provider, a portlet is a means through which content can be distributed in a personalized manner to a subscribing end-user. Finally, from the point of view of the portal, a portlet merely is a component which can be rendered within the portal page. In any case, by providing one or more individually selectable and configurable portlets in a portal, portal providers can distribute content and applications through a unified interface in a personalized manner according to the preferences of the end-user.
Portal servers are computer programs which facilitate the distribution of portal based web sites on the public Internet or a private intranet. Importantly, it will be recognized by one of ordinary skill in the art that the signature characteristic of all conventional portal servers can include the aggregation of content from several portlet applications within a single distributable page in a uniform manner. To that end, each portlet application within the portal page can be represented by a portlet user interface distributed by the portal server to requesting client computing devices.
One of the features of portlets is that they can be rendered in any of a variety of shapes besides standard cubic and rectangular shapes. A portlet rendered in an irregular shape such as a circle, however, results in the creation of white space. In page layout and illustration, white space is that portion of a page left unmarked. This includes the space between portlets, graphics, columns, lines of type or figures. White space is generally regarded as wasted space since there is no content present in the white space. With web page real estate at a premium, it is desirable to reduce the amount of white space rendered on portal web pages.
In addition to the creation of white space, a portlet rendered in an irregular shape results in the creation of irregularly-shaped, non-rectangular white space. This poses additional challenges when rendering a portal web page. Conventionally, graphics and other illustrations are drawn in a rectangular or cubic space that allows for easy rendering. Rendering in an irregular, non-rectangular shape, however, requires a higher level of processing so as to fit a rectangular graphic into an irregular shape.
Therefore, there is a need to improve upon the processes of the prior art and more particularly for a more efficient way for managing irregular white space around portlets.